Teeny Weenies: The Eighth Octopus

by David Lubar

  Some vacation this was turning out to be.

  “I’m sure it’s just down here,” Orville said, pointing to the corner ahead of them. “That’s what the man said.”

  Anna hoped he was right. They’d been walking forever, trying to find this restaurant. Her parents had really wanted to go there. A friend back home had told them, “If you are ever in Florence, be sure to eat at La Fontana.”

  So here they were, trying to follow directions that Orville claimed he understood perfectly.

  “Maybe you should ask someone else,” Anna said as they found themselves at the end of another street that didn’t go anywhere.

  “Why don’t you ask?” Orville sneered at her. “Let’s see how well you do?”

  “Now, kids…” Anna’s dad said. “Let’s not fight.”

  “I’ll ask,” Anna said. She’d had it with Orville and his attitude. But who could she ask? She looked around. There was an old man walking toward her. She went up to him, smiled, and asked, “La Fontana?” At the same time, she made eating motions, pretending to hold a knife and fork.

  The man grinned, nodded, and then replied in a stream of rapid Italian. Anna shrugged. The man repeated what he’d said. Anna shrugged again. She wished he’d speak more slowly. If she could hear each word separately, she thought she might at least be able to guess some of what he was saying. More than that, she wished she was back home playing her piano.

  “Slower, please,” she said.

  It was the man’s turn to respond with a shrug. He didn’t understand her.

  Anna thought about her piano again. That thought gave her an idea. She could see the word in her mind, just the way it was written on some of her music. She looked at the man and said, “Adagio.”

  “Adagio,” he said, grinning at her. And then he repeated the instructions, but much more slowly.

  It worked, Anna thought. She’d seen the word many times. It was used when music was supposed to be played slowly. As she listened to the man, she realized that there were other Italian words she knew from her music, like prima, facile, and tutti. Between the instructions on her sheet music, the names of many songs, and the words for parts of instruments, Anna discovered she had a great vocabulary. Italian wasn’t such a hard language, after all.

  When the man finished giving her the directions, Anna turned back to her family and said, “We make the next left, then go over the bridge. The restaurant is four blocks away, on the right.”

  Anna turned back to the man. She remembered another word. She hadn’t learned it in her musical studies, but it was the right word for the moment. “Grazie,” she said, thanking the man.

  “Prego,” the man replied.

  “This way,” Anna said. She led her family to the restaurant. Behind her, Orville was pleasantly silent for once. Apparently, he couldn’t think of a single word to say in any language.

  APRIL FOOLS

  Some kids love Halloween more than any other holiday. Some love Thanksgiving the most, or the Fourth of July. Not me. Those are all great holidays. I like candy and turkey and fireworks. But, more than anything else, I love playing pranks on people. I was born for April Fools’ Day. And it was almost here. Today was the last day in March. Tomorrow was the day I’d been waiting for all year.

  I like to play pranks on my parents and my friends, of course, but it’s especially fun to play jokes on my little brother, Ethan. He’s only six, so he’s pretty easy to fool. It was also fun to scare him a bit ahead of time.

  Right after Mom and Dad tucked him in and came downstairs, I said, “I should tell Ethan a bedtime story.”

  “How sweet of you,” Mom said as I headed upstairs.

  Oh, it would be sweet, all right. And not just tonight. I would have a totally sweet time tomorrow. But Ethan wouldn’t. He’d be suffering through a whole day of jokes.

  When I got to his room he was half asleep, looking all cute, innocent, and helpless in his spaceman pajamas, covered with spinning planets and zooming comets. Ethan is crazy about space. I think that’s because he’s as weird as an alien from Mars.

  “It’s almost here,” I said, making my voice mysterious and spooky.

  “I know,” he said.

  That surprised me. Ethan usually seemed totally clueless about holidays. But I kept going. “April Fools’ Day is coming, especially for you.”

  Before I could tack on an evil laugh, he said, “I’ve been waiting all my life for this.”

  That made no sense. He was six. So he’d already lived through April Fools’ Days a bunch of times. Though I guess he wouldn’t remember the first two or three. “All your life?” I asked.

  “Ever since last week when I was born,” he said.

  That was so weird, I decided to ignore it. Then, I figured out what was going on. He was trying to pull an April Fools’ joke on me. Good luck with that. First of all, it wasn’t April Fools’ Day until tomorrow. And second, I was the expert. Nobody was going to fool me. Especially not a little kid who still needed help tying his shoes and didn’t seem to know how long ago he’d been born. I was just way too clever to be tricked by him. But I decided to play along, because it would be fun watching his pathetic effort to fool me. And maybe it would give me an idea for an awesome joke to play on him tomorrow.

  “You were born last week?” I asked.

  He nodded. “That’s in Zoopersnooper weeks,” he said. “Our days are longer than yours, Earthling. But we have many of the same holidays.”

  “That’s great…” I struggled to keep from laughing. Zoopersnooper—what a ridiculous little-kid idea for the name of an alien planet. I would have done way better. Zardox. Phongo. Mixultra. See? I wasn’t just great at coming up with pranks. I was also totally awesome at making up names for planets.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said as I headed out of his room.

  Now, I just needed to think up the perfect stunt to play on my alien brother.

  Got it! I’m always awake before him, even though he goes to bed earlier. Tomorrow morning, I’d sneak into his room right before he woke up, and scare him with an alien mask. I didn’t have one, but I could make something pretty easily. It didn’t even have to be all that good, since it would be sort of dark in his room in the morning.

  We had a craft box downstairs, with all sorts of supplies. It wasn’t hard to cut a mask out of some green felt, and give it huge white eyes with slitted black pupils. I poked a small hole on each side of the mask and tied some rubber bands together to make a strap.

  The next morning, I slipped the mask over my face and crept into Ethan’s room. Then I stood over his bed and got ready to give him the scare of a lifetime. I had to keep from laughing and spoiling the surprise. This was going to be amazing.

  “April Fools!”

  I froze.

  Ethan had sat up fast and shouted the words before I could say them. He thrust out both hands, pointing all ten fingers at me. I was dazzled by a flash as tiny lightning bolts shot from his hands.

  And then, I was falling.

  I was so startled, I screamed. I tried to figure out where I was. That wasn’t easy, because I was spinning as I fell. I screamed again when the terrifying answer hit me. I was plunging down from the clouds, right toward the mouth of an active volcano that was spewing red-hot lava into the air.

  “Help!” I screamed.

  Lava shot up at me.

  Ethan stood on the rim of the volcano, laughing. The heat didn’t seem to bother him. He had a stick in one hand and a bag of marshmallows in the other. I realized he was toasting one of them over the volcano.

  Just when the heat became almost unbearable, Ethan shouted, “April Fools!” and thrust his hands out again, zapping me with more lightning bolts.

  After another dazzling flash, I was bobbing in the ocean. But I wasn’t on Earth. The water was red. But not red enough to hide the worst part. Huge eels with hundreds of teeth raced toward me, snapping their jaws.

  Ethan floated next to me, eating marshmallows. “
Isn’t this great?” he asked. “I really fooled you.”

  “No! It’s not great. Bring me home,” I begged.

  “No way,” he said. “I love April Fools’ Day.”

  Dark shapes wriggled toward me beneath the surface of the water. Right before the first eel chomped me, Ethan sent us into freezing cold outer space, and then into a jungle filled with giant mosquitoes. He let one of them stab me in the leg before zipping us to a nightmare of a planet that was far too close to its sun. He held up a bag of popcorn and laughed as the kernels popped from the heat.

  I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. Hang on, I told myself. It’s just one day. And then it will be over.

  But hours later, after I’d suffered countless horrors, I realized something. Ethan was six. At least, he was six in Earth years. But he’d said he’d been born last week. I tried to do the math as I hurtled toward a black hole that threatened to rip my atoms apart, and then got dragged by wild creatures across an endless valley of sharp gravel, but it was hard to think when Ethan kept shouting, “April Fools!” and laughing hysterically as he munched a variety of snacks.

  Six years was … I did a rough estimate. Six times three-hundred-sixty … It was about twenty-one hundred days.

  I screamed as I dropped into the gaping jaws of a lizard the size of a small city and slid down its throat.

  So, if that was one week for Ethan …

  I was up to my neck in what seemed to be sewage, struggling to do math while my mind was much more interested in discovering how many different types of screams I could produce.

  Twenty-one divided by seven is three.

  “No!” I shouted when it hit me that each of his alien days was about three hundred of my Earth days. “Stop!”

  Ethan stared at me with eyes that no longer seemed human. Or kind.

  “Stop?” He let out a laugh that chilled me, despite the fact that I was currently buried up to my neck in burning sand while centipedes nibbled at my ears. “Are you kidding? We’ve barely started.”

  I now knew three things for sure. First, and worst, my little brother really was an alien who was far better than I was at thinking up ways to make his sibling suffer. Second, it was going to be an unimaginably long and totally terrible day. And third, I needed to find a new favorite holiday—assuming I survived this one.

  FLAPPING IN THE BREEZE

  I have no idea who made the first dare, but somehow or other my friend Jimmy and I ended up right outside of the Parker house. It’s haunted. Everyone knows that. That’s why nobody goes near it. But there we were, right on the porch.

  Jimmy pointed at the door. “Try the knob, Sammy.”

  “You try it,” I said.

  I was hoping he’d chicken out. Then we could both go home.

  I spun as I heard a flapping sound. “Ghost!” I shouted.

  Jimmy dropped into a crouch. “Where?”

  I pointed toward the flapping, ready to make a run for safety. But then, I realized there was a ragged old flag on a pole that slanted up from the corner of the house, to the right of the porch. I could feel the breeze on my face. And I could feel my face flush as I watched the flag.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “Don’t do stuff like that,” Jimmy said.

  “Sorry.”

  “If you want to make up for it, try the door,” he said.

  There was no way I could back out now. And I figured I owed him one for scaring him. I reached out. Please be locked, I thought over and over. I put my fingers on the knob. It was rough and rusty. I turned it. It didn’t budge. “Locked,” I said.

  “I guess we’re not going inside,” Jimmy said.

  “Guess not. But you can’t say we didn’t try.” I could feel my muscles relax. I hadn’t even realized how tense I was. And then, like an idiot, I turned the knob the other way.

  That worked.

  I glanced over at Jimmy, hoping he’d already walked far enough away that he hadn’t heard the raspy sound of the latch sliding free. I could tell from his face that he’d noticed. There was no way I could pretend it hadn’t happened.

  I pushed the door open, hoping it wouldn’t creak.

  It was silent. I think that was even worse.

  “Now what?” Jimmy asked.

  “We go in. We walk around. And then we go home with proof,” I said, holding up my phone.

  “We’ll be the coolest kids in school,” Jimmy said.

  That thought gave me enough courage to walk inside. I tapped the flashlight icon on my phone and scanned the room. Except for a lot of dust, it could be any house.

  “They say two brothers lived here,” Jimmy said. “They were always fighting with each other. One day, things got violent.”

  “I know. I heard the same stories you did,” I said. There were all sorts of versions. None of them ended happily for the brothers.

  I’d reached the stairs. I knew I’d have to go up to the second floor. That’s where they said the brothers had died. But I didn’t have to go up first.

  I pointed up the stairs. “I opened the door. It’s your turn.”

  “But…” Jimmy didn’t seem to be able to come up with a good argument against this. He lifted one foot and put it on the first step like he was afraid it would collapse beneath him. He paused, then took another step.

  Almost finished, I told myself as I followed him up. We would walk down the hall, peek into the rooms, and then get out as fast as we could. And I’d probably have nightmares for a month or two. But it would be over.

  We had just reached the top step when the screams pierced the air.

  I screamed back as I spun and saw someone running down the hall from the left. It was a kid swinging a baseball bat.

  Jimmy grabbed my arm and pointed to the other end of the hall. Another kid was rushing at us wearing a hockey mask and waving a hockey stick.

  Without thinking, I threw my phone at the kid on my left, as hard as I could. My jaw dropped as the phone sailed right through him and smacked against the wall.

  “Ghosts!” Jimmy screamed.

  We turned to run.

  Our feet got tangled as we both tried to step onto the same spot.

  We tumbled down the stairs and crashed to the floor. I tried to stand, but the wind was knocked out of me. I pulled myself away from the stairs with my hands, then looked back.

  The ghosts were coming down the stairs.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jimmy said. “I’ll bet they can’t come outside.”

  I got to my feet and headed for the door, which we’d left open. I couldn’t wait to get outside and leave the ghosts behind. Everyone knows they can’t leave the place they are haunting. “Phew…” I said as I stepped onto the porch. “That was close.”

  “I thought we were dead,” Jimmy said.

  I jumped as the flag flapped again, real hard. I spun toward it and stared. This time, there was no breeze, but the flag flapped hard, like it was trying to break free of the pole.

  “Don’t tell me everything is haunted, now,” I said. I could picture things coming to life and startling me all the way home.

  Jimmy didn’t answer. He was staring across the lawn. “Sammy…” he said, pointing at a skinny birch tree near the street.

  I looked. The tree was bent against a strong wind. I looked all around. A piece of litter tumbled down the street, skittering like it was fleeing from a monster. The grass rippled. The flag flapped even harder.

  There was a strong wind.

  But I couldn’t feel it. I held my hand out. “It feels calm,” I said.

  “Dead calm,” Jimmy said.

  “We can’t feel the wind,” I said.

  Jimmy poked himself in the shoulder. “We can’t feel anything,” he said.

  We tried to leave the porch, but we couldn’t.

  I looked back inside, and saw myself at the bottom of the steps. Jimmy was on the floor next to me.

  “Why’d you run?” the kid with the bat asked. “We just wanted to pla
y.”

  “Sorry about screaming. We got excited,” the kid with the hockey stick said. “Hardly anybody ever comes to visit. And most of them run away from us.”

  It looked like the Parker house had gotten two more ghosts.

  Outside, the flag drooped as the breeze died back down.

  GO FLY A KITE

  The summer sea breeze ruffled the kites that sat outside the shop. It sounded to Kendra like they were clapping for her. “That’s the one I want,” she said, pointing to a bright green model that was nearly half her height.

  “It’s so plain and simple,” her mom said.

  “It’s perfect,” Kendra said.

  Her dad touched the chin of a fiery red dragon. “This one is amazing.”

  “It is,” Kendra said. “But it’s not the one I want.”

  Her mom walked over to a kite that looked like a giant goldfish splashed with a pattern of orange, yellow, white, and black. “This koi is beautiful.”

  “It is,” Kendra said. “But I know what I want.”

  So her parents bought her the simple, classic kite she wanted. It was made of thin paper attached to a diamond-shaped frame of wooden sticks. The label claimed, in big bold red letters, that it was a super kite, with more lift than any kite in the world.

  They headed for the beach.

  “That’s a strong wind,” her dad said as they walked close to the edge of the water.